The Invisible City

by Brian K. Lowe

  "Because despite my appearance, I am not one of them." I projected my words directly toward him now. I could afford no doubters. "I come from a land very, very far away. I was known by a different name there, but one thing was the same: They too suffered under an invading tyrant. When I first came here, I was glad for the peace and quiet afforded me. I did not know of the Nuum, but it was not long before I found out. My first experience with them showed me a cruel, selfish people who delighted in abusing their own power. I thought perhaps I was only seeing them at their worst, that with time I would come to understand their point of view. But I was mistaken—I had not seen them at anything approaching their worst.

  "Because of circumstances beyond my control, they took me to be one of their own. Even then they were cold and aloof. But I was caught up in their war. I was one and they were many, so I did what they wanted until I could escape.

  "Now I have friends, friends who stood by me when I needed them. Now we are many. I'm tired of running and hiding. And I'm not going to do it any more."

  Somewhere behind me a foot scraped the floor. Someone coughed. The council watched me intently. I hadn't said a damned thing, and they were still listening. The Lord had evidently not yet tired of protecting fools. I cast all my dice on my next throw.

  "You can live the rest of your lives in these tunnels, or you can fight the Nuum and live as free men. I can show you how to make weapons that will kill at a hundred yards without a sound." Jonn, or perhaps it was Ribaud, stared down at his hands. The others simply shook their heads sadly. I challenged them to speak their minds.

  Shene spoke for them all. "Do you think we haven't thought of this all before, Keryl Clee? We know these trees better than anyone. There hasn't been a Nuum who could walk safely alone outside in years. Even their tractor-probes fall into our traps. But it doesn't do any good. They just send more men, and more robots. We can keep them from doing what they came here for, but we can never stop them. We don't have the technology."

  I fingered the Library and pulled it from my pocket.

  "And if I could give you that technology?"

  Her eyes narrowed. Even Jonn looked up.

  "What do you mean?"

  I activated the Librarian. Before I left that room, I had an army.

  As with, I suspect, all medieval scholars, I had at one time carried on a romance with the bow and arrow. Unfortunately, I had abandoned it some time ago in the face of more pressing concerns, but I was delighted to find that while not so simple as riding a bicycle, it was yet a skill that had not utterly devolved over time. Nor was I forced to realize my other fear, that of not being able to reproduce my weapon of choice. I had never been a bowyer nor a fletcher, and had envisioned an extended period of trial and error in creating both a bow of sufficient power, and more importantly, an arrow that would fly in something approximating a straight line. I need not have worried, for the marvelous engineers in Tahana City quickly picked up on my crude design ideas and machined both bow and arrows in a single night.

  I was so impressed I considered moving straight on to crossbows, as they require less effort and deliver more power. I left off the idea for a simple reason: A archer can string and loose much faster than a crossbowman. If my men couldn't hit their targets, they could at least shoot a lot of arrows.

  This is not to say that none of them were proficient. Given enough hours of practice, anyone, man or ape, can learn to hit a target at twenty or thirty yards. I tutored the men while Balu, my best ape student, assisted his own kind. There was no derogation intended; the gorillas simply handled heavier bows. Safety demanded we practice in different areas.

  I should have been far better than any of them; I was simply reviving an old skill while they were still learning it afresh, but the virus interfered with my concentration and aim. Perhaps it was not so bad, then, that my plan called for me not to take place in the attack.

  Two weeks were allowed for training. It would have taken far longer for the men to become truly proficient, but we only needed to win one battle, wherein if I did my part we would hold the advantages of surprise, numbers, and terrain. If I didn't do my part, our plan failed no matter how well we imitated Robin and the Merry Men.

  The sky was still grey and the ground wet when I stumbled into the clearing around the bio-research station. My clothes were realistically torn and muddy from having walked several miles through the jungle at night without my guides assisting me. I was thin from several days' near-fasting, and the hunted look in my eyes was no play-acting: I was jumping from the monster-infested trees to the monster-infested buildings. I was not terribly brave, only terribly desperate. I simply let my true feelings show through.

  I ran to the nearest door, pounding hysterically. No one knew what security measures the Nuum followed, except that they could monitor their own clearing. We were fairly sure that their sensors failed within the first few yards past the tree line, but since none of the conservationists had tested the defenses in some time and the Nuum ventured out so seldom, we could not be sure of that any more than we had been sure that they would not shoot me the moment I came into view.

  Barely had my fist hit the door than it flew open and I fell forward. Several hands grabbed me, unceremoniously pulling me through, and the door slammed shut again. It was so close I felt the rush of air.

  My rescuers pulled me up with a jerk among a babble of voices. I was surrounded by strangers' faces, their eyes wide, their mouths gaping.

  "It is him! It's Clee!"

  "That's incredible!"

  "How did he do it?"

  A more controlled voice took command, from beyond the crowd that limited my vision. "Let's get him to the infirmary." That was a voice I was happy to listen to.

  I was half-escorted, half-carried to the infirmary with a solicitude well outstripping anything I had been previously afforded. From the whispered exchanges of my handlers, I gathered that I was a brand of local celebrity: Apparently my disappearance had gained me a notoriety I could have done without. It also granted the Nuum a humanity I was loathe to recognize. With an effort I divorced that concept from my thinking.

  The doctor was easier to deal with, even withal that I spent more time with him, for his manner was professionally distant. Comparing him in my mind with the equally competent but more accessible Dr. Chala, allowed him to remain a facade, a figure of authority and learning rather than a person.

  Even in wartime, people are never as easy to kill as figures of authority.

  Suddenly the doctor paused in his examination, straightened, and stared quizzically at his instruments. Then he bent over me, pulling up one eyelid, and frowned at his instruments again. I tensed.

  He looked as though he were about to speak, thought better of it, and turned away. I half-rose from the hard pallet that served as examining table and diagnostic tool. Everything depended on my ability to pose again as a Nuum until I could reach my pre-arranged post. If the doctor had detected some anomaly that marked my true birth… I glanced around quickly; if I couldn't find a surgical tool, I would have to use my bare hands.

  My breath came shallowly. If he moved toward the door, I would assume the worst. But he didn't; he turned again to me—a gas syringe in his hand.

  "Take it easy," he said, gently pushing me back. "You'll not be sharing your adventures with the mess hall gangs just yet." The syringe was pressed gently against my neck and released its contents with a hiss I felt more than heard. "You're sicker than you think. I don't know how or why, but something you ran into out there caused serious cellular damage. You weren't living in an abandoned building, were you? Some of those old wrecks still have active power piles, and the radiation leakage is something you don't want to think about." He pulled back my lower lip, then the upper. "You don't appear to have been exposed, but something sure was playing havoc with your immune system."

  "I have been having headaches," I ventured tentatively, thinking he might be referring to my virus.

  He snorted. "
And a lot of other things, I imagine. Maybe it was a poison. Were you bitten by anything?"

  I thought wryly of the vaccinations and warnings we had received before I left the Nuum ship. Apparently this doctor thought no more of them than I did. I shook my head. Better, I thought, not to go into my close escape from the tiger spiders.

  "Well, something got into you. I'll want to do a tox screen, but first I need to get some cellular rejuvenators into you. You seem to have stabilized, but whatever it was, it was causing your cells to age at an accelerated rate. I don't think you'd have lived to see 80."

  I could not help staring.

  "Oh, don't worry about it," he said, busying himself again with dials and lights. "Just stay out of the jungle and you'll be telling this story to your great-great-grandchildren."

  23. I Am Given New Life

  My original plan had consisted solely of infiltrating the Nuum station, stealing the information I needed via the Library, and getting out again. It was to have been quick and relatively quiet, my reappearance and subsequent re-disappearance an object of curiosity to the aloof Nuum, but not, I believed, a long-term consideration. In that I had been mistaken. I had not counted on the excitement accompanying my return, or the notoriety it would afford me. My re-disappearance would have the station's entire complement out looking for me—in force.

  That original idea, however, had already been abandoned before I met the conservationists, as I came to consider the difference between the Nuum and the German hordes of my own time—which is to say, almost none. Each occupied a land in defiance of the people who owned it. Each used his power to enslave, and to kill when it suited his purposes. The only true difference lay in the fact that the Nuum had already accomplished what the Germans still sought: domination. The Earth of this day and age was a conquered nation, and every free American fiber of my being rose up in indignation and outrage at the thought.

  And so I had come to be here, lying on an examining table, contemplating how best to kill the man who had just doubled my lifespan.

  I thought of the hundreds of Bantos Han's neighbors turned to grey dust on the streets of Vardan. I thought of French and Belgian villagers crushed by the Hun. Were he to realize that I was not Nuum, this doctor would turn me over to my enemies. If this were still 1915 and I were dressed in a stolen German uniform, would I hesitate?

  No, I would not. But neither could I kill him in cold blood. Regardless of his uniform, he was a man of medicine, and a non-combatant. Unless he took up arms against me, killing him would be murder, no less a crime than the Thorans or the Belgians had suffered.

  "Excuse me while I fetch another analyzer," he muttered suddenly. I tensed once more, but this time he disappeared into a small supply closet. Without thinking, I slipped from the diagnostic bed, slammed the door on him, and blocked it with a chair. He began to pound his fists against the other side, shouting for me to let him out. I risked someone hearing him, but that was the price I paid for my humanity.

  The treatments he had administered left me feeling unsteady, compounding my confusion at being faced with the host of blinking lights and gaping data sockets. I pulled out the Library and placed it in the nearest socket, as the Librarian had told me to do. "All of the systems are so interdependent it won't matter where you plug me in," he had said. "The kind of computing power I need to accomplish our goal isn't even supposed to exist on this continent, let alone in the hands of the Thorans, so the security interdicts will be elementary."

  Nothing seemed to happen for several minutes: the lights blinked on and off as before and no smoke came pouring through the consoles, so I was forced to presume that the Librarian was right, and three centuries of peaceful tyranny had left the Nuum complacent. The doctor's pounding had calmed somewhat, as he realized that I was not going to let him out, nor was anyone apparently coming to rescue him. This left me profoundly relieved, as I had dreaded the necessity of asking him to prescribe a headache remedy if he didn't stop.

  Where the doctor's shouting had left off, the sudden sirens more than made up for him.

  The plan had called for the Library to tap the central computer system, bypass the security blockades, and simulate a fusion core-breach alarm. The Nuum, fearing a malfunction, would flee the station—only to find the conservationists and Timash's people waiting for them. It would only be payment-in-kind—but it would still be a massacre. Meanwhile, I huddled in the infirmary, wondering how to explain my decision to spare the doctor. Perhaps the Library had failed, I thought with gallows cheer, and the core breach was real. That would solve all of my problems in one quick flash of light.

  My problems were only beginning. The infirmary door flew open and a Nuum dashed in.

  "Quick! We're evacuating! Where's the doctor?"

  That question was answered without any help from me—the doctor began shouting and pounding the door once again. The safety officer saw the chair propped up and leaped to the correct conclusion in an instant, his sidearm erupting from its place at his side and holding me fast in its sights. He waved it toward the closet.

  "Let him out." I started to obey, but suddenly he seemed to realize that I was going to have to move the chair, placing a potential weapon in my hands.

  “Hold on—“

  There was a noise at the doorway, and a familiar voice said: “Keryl?”

  We both turned to look, but since the guard was between me and the door, that meant he was looking away from me—a costlier error than giving me a flimsy piece of furniture. I was on him in an instant, and swiftly rendered him unconscious.

  "Harros!"

  My former bunkmate shook his head in concern. "I heard you were back. What’s going on in here?" He cast a glance toward the noisy closet.

  My mind was spinning. I had saved the doctor for my own reasons, but now: The doctor, the unconscious guard, Harros—how was I going to protect all these Nuum from my allies…or explain it to them when I was done? Could Harros be trusted? Not that it mattered, I reflected bitterly, since I could not send him to his death outside when I had another choice.

  "Come on," he urged suddenly. "I'll tell you about it later. The core is going to breach any second!"

  "Relax," I said, sitting on the examining table. "The alert is a fake." I had to tell him; he would find out soon enough, unless he went outside, which I could not now in all good conscience let him do. It was no accident, however, that I was sitting where my body blocked his view of the console into which I had plugged the Library.

  He took it better than I had thought, a sly smile stretching his lips most unattractively.

  "That explains the guns and the doctor locked in the closet. I always knew there was something odd about you. You don't agree with the occupation either, do you?"

  It was my turn to control my surprise. "I beg your pardon?"

  He looked up and down the corridor before he responded, then stepped inside and closed the door.

  "We do have to get out of here, you know. They'll be back."

  I shook my head slowly. "No, they won't." As a precaution, the Library had sealed all of the doors. Possibly some would escape into the jungle, but no one would be coming back.

  "You're amazing." He seemed genuinely impressed. "How did you do it?"

  "I have friends," I said curtly. Not only did I not want to disclose the existence of the Library, but I didn't want him to think that the gun gave him any advantage. "They'll be here soon. You didn't answer my question: Why did you help me?"

  "They threw me into confinement after you disappeared. I was feeling out others to see how they felt about the occupation and what we were doing here, and I must have asked the wrong man."

  I sat silently for a time, waiting for developments and cultivating an attitude that would dissuade questions. It appeared successful, as Harros looked several times on the verge of speaking, but then the urge subsided and the silence stretched on.

  I stood. "You'd better get behind me. When my friends arrive, you don't want them to
draw the wrong conclusions."

  "What if it's not them? What if someone else shows up?" he asked, hesitating.

  "Then you still don't want to be between me and the door.” I gestured with the pistol to illustrate my point.

  Moments later the door slid open again. Although they had professed to loathe them, the conservationists handled Nuum armaments with great confidence.

  I had a much less difficult time explaining the doctor's survival to my allies than I had in convincing the doctor himself that my allies were not bent on curtailing his good fortune. I had expected, perhaps naively, that my having spared his life, and the explanation of why we were eager to enlist his cooperation, would pique his interest sufficiently to overcome his anxiety. Unfortunately, he denounced my story about a telepathic virus as outlandish, and insisted that it was simply a cover for our real goal, although he could not perceive what that might be.

  This presented a serious problem; Dr. Chala had performed all of the preliminary work on my case, but we had agreed that the gorillas' involvement in this must remain privileged information. (Originally, of course, that would not have been a consideration. Dead men tell no tales.) In the end, however, two circumstances combined to satisfy all concerns: First, a simple examination confirmed my viral infection; and second, the Librarian recommended a forgotten interrogation technique which, while harmless, would have such a pronounced effect on his short-term memory that nothing he learned about us would survive. It was agreed that once my cure was effected, all the prisoners would be drugged and delivered safely to a town whence they could make their way homeward. In the meantime, Harros and the guard who had so fortuitously discovered me were interned in the brig.

  Together with the Librarian, the two physicians buried themselves in the Nuum database. It was not long before they developed such an attitude of mutual respect that I suspect they both regretted that their collaboration was to be so short-lived, nor was it much later that they announced the results of their work.